Inside the park is Mughwango Hill, the site of George Adamson’s camp, and the hill was the playground of Elsa the lion. Joy and George Adamson reintroduced their beloved lioness “Elsa” into the wild in Meru National Park. They wrote a book about their experience, which was made into a feature film “Born Free” starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers. The movie was groundbreaking, being the first to depict wild animals as endearing creatures, whose plight the audience could sympathize with. George Adamson continued to work with lions, living to the south of Meru National Park, until his death in 1989. Both Joy Adamson and Elsa the lioness are buried in Meru National Park.

The park has enormous diversity of habitat and wildlife, from cool forests at 3400 ft to the west, dropping down to 1000 ft semi-desert plains with giant baobab and commiphora trees. It has thirteen clear springs fed rivers lined with palms and riverine forest, and is home to basking hippos. This is lion and elephant country, but also Meru is home to many rare species including caracal, the beautiful Lesser Kudu, aardwolf, and over 400 species of birds.

The park also has an 84 sq km rhino sanctuary housing over 60 black and white rhino. The area is so large that finding the rhino can still be a game driving challenge. Meru National Park is one of the least visited and therefore one of the least spoiled of Kenya’s national parks. The equator bisects the park whose 1810 sq km landscape is mainly given over to bushland but with grasslands in the west. Thick forests grow along the park’s many watercourses.